


they can't believe i made you weak

by kiira



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: F/F, i get mad daily that rebecca's dead and not living in new jersey with faith evidently, this fic is my Love and a Specific interest so like., this is my contribution to femslash feb :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 11:45:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5966202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiira/pseuds/kiira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in which rebecca sutter is alive, faith lehane tried to escape her past and they both need a roommate</p>
            </blockquote>





	they can't believe i made you weak

**Author's Note:**

> this au is my child and is how htgawm s1 should have ended

It’s Kennedy who ends up posting the roommate ad for you, after two years of your insisting it’s unnecessary. 

“For fuck’s sake, Faith,” she sighs, glancing around your practically empty apartment. “No offense, but you’re not exactly the healthiest of people on your own. I mean –– when was the last time you went out with someone more than once?” 

You start to shrug, but evidently it wasn’t meant to be answered because she keeps talking. 

“I mean, I’d offer to move in, but you know––” and raises her eyebrows with a smirk at you.

And yeah, you do know. 

You had the particular misfortune of rooming next to her and her long string of girl-toys back at Angel’s place. 

/

The first guy who responds to the ad immediately begins asking you about your sleeping habits, and you glare at him until he leaves –– Kennedy scolds you in a way that sounds disturbingly like Willow. 

The second girl looks uncomfortably between you and Kennedy for the entire interview until she asks at the end if you’re “homosexuals” and Kennedy kicks her out with a couple of well worded insults. 

/

“This one’s a bartender,” you say, and Kennedy wrinkles her nose. 

“C’mon Kenny, you gotta give her a try. She’s–– ” and you glance down at the half-filled in application, “twenty-two and if I let her live with me you can stop coming over here to make sure I haven’t drunk myself to death.”

“Not funny, Lehane,” but she nods for you to call the girl. 

/

Rebecca looks like she could kill you in your sleep, and plays punk music too loud. She leaves a mess in the kitchen, and double-locks the door every night when she stomps in at 4am. 

Kennedy had taken one look at her and shook her head, muttering something about  _ I want to make sure you’re not dead, not give you a new drinking partner _ , but you  _ liked  _ Rebecca and didn’t mind her bizarre hours. 

You don’t think she minds your  _ quirks  _ until one Monday morning when she picks the lock to the front hall closet. 

“The fuck is in your closet,” and she says it like it’s not really a question. 

Because: you can go through the thirteen knives, four guns, two dozen stakes and one long, terrifying sword in your mind, can imagine the curve of the blades and the weight of the guns, and you know normal twenty-somethings don’t keep a fucking arsenal behind their motorcycle jacket, but normal twenty-somethings haven’t survived a half-dozen apocalypses. 

“You some kind of serial killer?” Rebecca snaps –– you found the knives under her bed  _ weeks  _ ago, so you know she’s not close to any kind of saint –– and you just close your eyes again. 

She scoffs and slams your bedroom door, the closet door, and the front door and doesn’t come home for three days. 

/

When she does get back, she’s got a smooth outline of a blade tucked into her waistband, and her mouth is a hard, set line. 

“You running from someone?” Rebecca asks, carefully not looking at the closet.

“Not anymore,” you answer, and remember the quiet click of the deadbolt every night. “Are you?” 

“You could say that,” except she always needs to be looking at the door, only sleeps with the light on, and you don’t know where she keeps getting her knives. 

You just raise one eyebrow at her, and she glares back, before pulling the knife out and throwing it on the table. 

“They tied me up in a basement because they thought I killed –– a girl,” and she says  _ a girl  _ like you say  _ Buffy.  _

Something in you wants to tell her about all the fucking blood on your hands, but you –– can’t, you just nod once.

She leaves the blade on the table. 

/

You really don’t sleep much anymore, and Rebecca gets home at ridiculous hours, smelling like cheap beer and sweat. 

It’s mostly because of this that you start making dinner at 4am –– you don’t care, and she’s probably hungry. 

It’s usually pasta, or burgers, or anything you can make without thinking at all. Rebecca doesn’t ever thank you, just sits across the table and eats as quickly as she can, like someone’s going to take it from her if she starts to breathe.

Buffy used to laugh at you for doing this but: she’s never really been hungry. 

/

“You wanna go out?” She says one morning, standing in the doorway of your bedroom. She doesn’t really ever knock, or if she does, she knocks and then walks in before you have a chance to answer. 

“This a date, Sutter?” 

She doesn’t answer you, just throws your jacket at you and yells over her shoulder, “Take me someplace nice that doesn’t smell like a fucking bar,” and it takes you a few minutes to remember the diner a few blocks from your apartment. 

She’s sitting on the kitchen table when you come out, wearing what is almost most definitely one of your old jackets, kicking one of the table legs. 

There’s a scuff where her heel comes down, and you wonder how often she does this. 

“Walking good with you, princess?” 

She scoffs at you, something about  _ unless you steal a car, that’s all we’ve got _ , except that’s not entirely true, your motorcycle is locked up in the basement. 

But –– you’re not really sure how you feel about Rebecca pressed up against your back, her arms around your waist, so you just shove her off the table towards the door. 

/

She orders blueberry pancakes, and laughs at your four cups of coffee.

/

Saturday night, Willow calls you with a demon nest and you stumble back to the apartment soaking wet and covered in something vaguely resembling blood. 

Rebecca’s usually at work by the time you’re scrubbing your knives in the kitchen sink, but you fumble with the keys for a minute before someone inside yells something that sounds like, “It’s not locked,” and when you kick at the door, it swings open. 

She’s lying on the couch, and when she turns her head to look at you, her eyes are bright and her smile is messy, falling apart. 

“You gotta lock the door, princess,” and quickly change into a sweatshirt and shorts before shoving her feet over so you can sit on the end corner of the sofa. 

“They’re gonna find me anyway,” she laughs, and she’s clearly drunk or high or both, “they’re gonna find me, and  _ fuck,  _ I don’t know, kill me or something. Probably think they’re doing the right thing, putting me down like a rabid fucking dog.” 

Her ankles are thin, bony; you could put your whole hand around one.

“I’m gonna die, Faith,” she says solemnly, and then dissolves into giggles. 

_ They would have to get through me _ , you want to tell her,  _ don’t worry, they would have to get through me _ , but reassurance falls flat on your tongue, you’ve never been a protector. 

So you trace all the small bones in her foot, fall asleep half-slumped onto her. 

/

You’re washing dishes and she’s drying them, perched on the kitchen counter and telling you some winding story about something that had happened that night. 

You don’t really notice that she’s not talking anymore until she kicks you hard in the side of your thigh. 

“I asked you a question, Lehane. What’s with the torture room?” 

“Did some bad shit,” you respond, and your hand is shaking in the dishwater, “and I’m making up for it now. What’s with the knives under your bed?”

She freezes, and then looks at you seriously, “I’m a serial killer and planning on murdering you in your sleep,” and keeps her face straight long enough for you to wonder how much she lies.   

/

“You were in prison on two charges of first-degree murder,” she says conversationally one morning. 

Everything screeches to a halt, and Rebecca keeps talking.

“You were eighteen, and for some reason you escaped when you were twenty-one. There was a nationwide manhunt, until somehow it was called off two weeks in. You’re considered armed and dangerous. And you take your coffee black with two sugars,” she adds, almost as an afterthought. 

She’s wearing too much eyeliner, like usual, and standing there like she didn’t just pull you apart. You grab the front of her jacket –– realize distantly it’s  _ yours _ , that she’s wearing your jacket again –– and pull her into your bedroom, shut and lock the door. 

“How long have you known?” 

She shrugs, “Two months? Maybe three. I found some old letters of yours in the kitchen drawer. Took thirty minutes to find it all online.” 

“You scared to sleep at night?” And it’s not really a joke, not at all, but Rebecca laughs. 

“No more than usual. Let’s go get something to eat.” 

You order her breakfast without really thinking, and when she mocks your coffee for the upteenth time, you pinch her thigh under the table.

/

“Am I ever going to be allowed to know anything about you, besides that you were tied up in a basement once?”

You’re sitting with her on the couch, some basketball game on TV, her hair curled in your fingers. 

“They were law students,” she mutters, leaning back until her head is almost in your lap, “and it was a bathroom too. And we’re not doing a heart-to-heart, last person I did this with was the one who taped my mouth shut and my wrists and ankles together.”  

“Because they thought you killed –– some girl?” 

“We’re not doing this. And Lila. They thought I killed Lila.” 

“Did you?”

She looks horrified, almost like she’s going to cry.

“No.  _ God _ , no. She was –– I lo ––” and her face settles into something blank, she stares at her hands. 

“I’m sorry,” you say quietly, the words strange in your mouth.

She shrugs, face carefully empty. 

“It’s over now,” she says, voice quiet and flat. “I don’t care anymore, I don’t know anything,” like she’s lying, like she’s said it thousands of times. 

/

This is what you know about her: she’s from Philadelphia, once she was tied up in a basement or in a bathroom or both by someone she loved, she drowns her blueberry pancakes in strawberry syrup, you think she’s afraid of water, someone broke her left arm once and it lies crooked, she likes wearing your jackets, is in love with a dead girl. 

She wears too much eyeliner and paints her nails black using your nail polish, lies like you’re going to stab her in the back, has trust issues that would rival sixteen-year-old Faith’s, rival twenty-three-year-old Faith’s. 

At night, you can’t tell whose nightmare you’re hearing: hers or yours. 

/

Neither of you really have any friends: too fucked up, too used to being lonely, too hard to love someone else. 

Kennedy still comes over sometimes, but she lives in LA now, halfway across the country. She still looks at Rebecca like Rebecca’s some kind of criminal. 

“So, Sutter,” she sneers. “What do you do for work?” 

Rebecca slams Kennedy’s beer down in front of her and glares at you over her head. “I’m a fucking kindergarten teacher. You?”

Kennedy blushes a little: you know she lives off her parent’s trust fund and if you know, Rebecca’s probably found out somehow. 

“Anyways, Kenny, Faith here’s told me some … interesting things about you,” and you can’t remember ever bringing Kennedy up in a conversation for more than twenty seconds. “Seems you two had a thing before I moved in?” 

Kennedy’s mouth falls open, and you would find it funny if you weren’t completely in shock. 

“All while you had a girlfriend, yeah? So shut the fuck up about me and my life, cause you’re no fucking angel either.” 

Kennedy leaves soon after that, giving you an angry whispered lecture in the living room about what details of your personal life you tell to punk drifters, except you never really  _ told  _ Rebecca about you and Kenn. 

Once Kennedy slams the front door shut, you turn on Rebecca, who’s trying not to laugh in the kitchen.

“How the  _ fuck  _ did you know me and Kennedy were screwing?” 

She shrugs, jumping up to sit onto the counter. 

“You’re not as subtle as you think. Plus, some of the crap in your dresser can’t be yours,” and she picks at the red and black t-shirt she’s wearing. 

You try to glare at her and fail, so you push yourself up to sit on the table facing her. 

“Come on, Faith, she kept looking at me like I was going to rob you blind and then sleep with your boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever. You would have done the same thing,” and she kicks her feet out across so they’re resting on your knees. 

She finishes Kennedy’s beer before you can remember to answer her, then reaches for yours. 

“Was she any good in bed?” 

“She’s got a tongue ring,” and Rebecca raises your beer can in a mock salute. 

/

Sometimes she sits on the couch, her knees pulled up to her chest. You’re not really sure where she goes then –– a basement somewhere or maybe it was a bathroom or something about a law office. 

You usually just sit down next to her, and turn on a basketball or baseball or football game, wait for her to snap back into place with some kind of lie. 

In January, a girl named Laurel shows up at your apartment and Rebecca presses herself in the closet, between your knives and stakes. 

She’s looking for Rebecca, she says, and they got a tip that she was living in your building. 

You think that Laurel’s “they” is the same as Rebecca’s, so you put your hand on the closet door and lie between your teeth. 

No, you haven’t seen anyone fitting Rebecca’s description, and maybe people had seen you and seen this stranger.

Dark curly hair, too much makeup and a habit of wearing black: it wouldn’t be the first time your people had confused the two of you, and Laurel gives you a piercing stare for a second before nodding slowly. 

“You sure you don’t have a cousin named Rebecca?” She jokes, her voice high and fake, and you shut your door in her face. 

You get drunk with Rebecca that night, and she doesn’t say a word about this Laurel girl or about the ever-present they. She just digs her fingers into your neck, hard enough to leave a mark if you were anything close to human, and presses her forehead against your jaw. 

“We’re good people, aren’t we?” She says into the dark crook of your neck, and you dig your nails into the back of her head. 

_ I don’t know _ , you want to say, but all you can really do is shrug, hitting her chin with your shoulder. Her hands are cold on your neck, her breath hot, and she fits her head against your collarbone. 

“Do you trust me?”

You could lie to her, but you’re both drunk, you think she’s high, and you’re sure she won’t remember this in the morning. 

“Yeah,” you whisper, and her hands loosen around your neck. 

/

You wake up the next morning with her arms curled around your waist. 

/

For your twenty-fourth birthday, she presents you with a piece of paper with “Faith’s Torture Room” scrawled on it in ballpoint pen and a key to the lock on her bedroom door.

“This sounds like I have a sex dungeon in our apartment,” and she tapes it to the closet door with a smirk.

You don’t mention the key, don’t know what it  _ means _ , and she just laughs when you can’t get it onto your key ring. 

/

Some days now, Rebecca leaves one of the locks undone. She’s jumpier on those days but: she hasn’t gone under her bed for the knives yet, just keeps one eye on the door. 

Sometimes, she mentions something from Philadelphia that sounds almost nice, a dropped mention of a boyfriend, Wes or West or something. You don’t ask if he’s the one who tied her up. 

You don’t really need to –– she looks  _ scared  _ almost when she says his name, scared maybe, or furious. 

/

Demons don’t slow down just because you confusingly like a girl –– if anything, they decide it’s time to extra fuck you over. 

You start coming home looking more and more like you picked the fight with the wrong guy in a bar: sprained wrists, dislocated shoulders, a couple broken ribs, and one horribly memorable time, a particularly vengeful Nezzla (you think, at least –– neither you never bothered to actually learn the names of the things you were fighting for years) shatters all the bones in your right hand. 

It’s around then that Rebecca figures out that you aren’t a part-time waitress (you  _ were _ –– slaying doesn’t pay the bills –– but they fired you after you skipped to patrol one too many times), but she doesn’t really seem to care. 

You next across from her at the kitchen table, your useless, broken hand in her lap, as she clumsily tries to wrap it all up.

“You really should go to the hospital, dumbass,” she mutters, adding a couple more strips of medical tape for good measure, “I’m not a fucking doctor.”

It will heal in a week, but she doesn’t need to know this.

“I’ll survive,” and she’s finished, but you keep your bandaged hand resting on her thigh. She keeps her hand loosely wrapped around your wrist. Neither of you move, until there’s something too heavy, too much in the air, so you stand up quickly, try to shake it off.

“You wanna get really drunk?” you ask her, and she smiles when you hand her the vodka, brushes her hand against your fingers for a moment too long.

/

You wake up the next morning in Rebecca’s bed, and she’s in Kennedy’s old t-shirt, one you had stolen so long ago it was practically yours. 

Nothing  _ happened,  _ you know, but she’s warm and tangled in the sheets and you find yourself quietly wishing something had.

/

Buffy comes to visit on Sunday afternoon; it’s not so much a visit as a business meeting, where she uses more euphemisms than actual statements. “Vampires” become “the problem,” “demons” become “the slightly smaller problem,” and “we were in love with each other until everything turned to shit”  becomes “the incident.”

Most of it’s for the benefit of Rebecca, who’s lounging with some half-read book she found at the bar one night on her chest. She’s pretending to be asleep, and Buffy keeps shooting worried glances at her, until you grab Buffy’s wrist and drag her out into the hallway.

“My roommate,” because she doesn’t deserve anything more, not now.

“Oh,” Buffy whispers, like Rebecca’s listening at the door. “It’s good for you, to have someone.”

“Still not my fucking therapist, Summers.”

She gives you a sad look, and reminds you to keep an eye on the as-yet-undecided nest of demons downtown. For a moment, she looks like she’s going to hug you, but she just nods and turns, clicking down the hall in heeled boots.

You press the heel of your hands into your eyes until you see stars. 

/

When you slam the door behind you, Rebecca’s still lying on the couch, her sleeping act dropped.

“Is she what fucked you up so badly?” she asks conversationally.

And  _ no,  _ it wasn’t Buffy –– it was, it was Buffy and Wesley and Giles and Willow, the Mayor and yourself and your own goddamn mother –– and Rebecca’s lying on the couch, picking at her nail polish.

“Not really,” you say, and sit down, pinning Rebecca’s legs under you. It would probably freak her out if you started cleaning a gun, and your shattered hand still aches. It hurt more than a lot of things: you don’t really remember falling off a building, and all you have from Buffy’s knife is a scar, clean and smooth. 

/

Rebecca falls asleep like that, her book slipping dangerously towards the floor, her breathing even and quiet.

She doesn’t wake up until you leave. 

/

She’s got a cell phone, pink and the ring tone is some pop song you’re almost entirely sure Rebecca has never heard. It rings in the middle of the night, and sometimes you can hear her answer it, angry and half-asleep.

“Lila’s not here,” or “Stop fucking calling,” or “Find another goddamn dealer, you dick,” and Lila was the name of her dead girl. 

Once though, it rings while she’s watching TV next to you and drinking your beer. She’s mid-laugh when it goes off, and her eyes go wide and frightened.

“Answer it,” she hisses at you, practically throwing the thing at you. “Fucking answer it, you don’t know me.”

“Rebecca?” The voice on the line says, “Rebecca, god are you there?”

You’re silent.

It’s a boy and he sounds  _ worried,  _ like he’s afraid he’s going to hear her voice. Or maybe afraid he isn’t. 

“Rebecca?”

“Um,” you say, and Rebecca’s hand is cutting off circulation in your leg. “Um, no. This is Tara?”

He sighs on the other side, “Do you know a Rebecca? Where did you get this phone number? Can you tell me if she’s okay?”

Rebecca looks at you, shaking her head.

“I mean, I know Becky Chase? In my… literature class. Do you wanna talk to her? I can give you her number?” 

He’s quiet for a minute, and then apologizes to you, something about the wrong, or a misremembered number. 

You’re about to hang up, and tell Rebecca to destroy the fucking thing when he says, “If you do know where she is, can you tell her I’m sorry?” and the line cuts out.

“Some guy says he’s sorry,” you say as you slap the phone back into her hand and she shakes her head. 

“He’s not.” 

She stands up and leaves you, locking her bedroom door behind her for the first time in weeks.

/

You knock at two in the morning –– you have a key, she gave it to you, but –– you knock and she unlocks the door, staring at you out from the crack. 

“Go away,” except you know she doesn’t mean that. 

“I brought whatever it is you stole from the bar this week,” and hold up a bottle of the stuff. 

Rebecca sighs, but lets the door swing open, standing there still fully dressed. It’s clear she had been crying, but now she just looks angry. 

“Who was that, on the phone?”

“A huge fucking mistake,” and she takes the bottle from your hands (vodka, you think –– the label is worryingly not in English) and falls back onto her bed. You take the more neutral leaning against the wall approach, but she just scoffs at you, motioning at the empty spot beside her on the bed. 

“There was a murder case,” she continues, and passes the bottle to you. “And he was a lawyer, almost a lawyer on the case. I mean, he was a law student. Working for the actual lawyer on the case. Everyone thought we were screwing, me and him, and as soon as I convinced them we weren’t, we started to.”

“Shit,” you say, and because you can’t think of anything else, “Is that even legal?”

“He wasn’t the  _ lawyer _ ,” she sighs, and motions for you to hand back the bottle. “But anyways, everything fell apart pretty fucking quickly, and he ended up killing the actual lawyer’s husband. They ended up paranoid, thought I had to do with the original murder, locked me in the basement.”

“He did it for me,” she adds, almost as an afterthought, “murdered the husband. But it doesn’t matter in the end ––they all thought I was the killer when he was just sitting there, more guilty of anything I ever fucking did.” 

“Shit,” you say again.

You both sit in silence, and the vodka burns, and you sit in silence.

“Anyways,” she says, her hand closer and closer to yours, “what the hell brought you here? No one lives in Garfield, New Jersey because they  _ want  _ to.” 

There’s no way to explain to her what’s happened, not without talking about the literal end of the world. 

So you shrug, and take the vodka back from her, “Shitty childhood, prison, a good relationship we both screwed up, take your choice.” 

“Juvie here,” and her pinky is looped around yours, and her hair is brushing your bare shoulder, and then she’s messily sitting in your lap, staring intently into your eyes.

“We good?” She asks, her hands hot against your hips, and as soon as you nod, she’s leaning in and kissing you. 

You’re both tipsy, but she’s steady and warm and when you accidentally bite her lip, she makes a quiet noise, something you want to hear again and again and again. She pushes her hands up and under your tank top, but you pull away.

“We shouldn’t, not now,” and she looks hurt until you nod at the vodka balancing precariously between pillows. “I’ll sleep here though.”

It’s not the first time you’ve slept next to Rebecca, except this time she can press kisses to your jaw, can drop off to sleep without pretending she’s not next to you. 

/

At the diner the next morning, she orders pancakes and keeps her pinky looped with yours the entire time.

**Author's Note:**

> I FULLY RECOGNIZE THIS AS 100% WISH FULFILLMENT!!


End file.
